Jolicloud to rain in the Jolibook on Friday?

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The Jolibook from Jolicloud could land as soon as 19 November, according to a report in the WSJ.

The 10.1-inch netbook, which runs via the Linux-based Jolicloud OS (an Ubuntu distro) has been talked up as a netbook made easy, but the rumoured price is a bit higher than we would have expected.

For a pound short of £280, this is an Intel Atom N550, 1GHz, powered machine with a 250GB hard-drive. But, when you consider that it's lacking Windows, the price seems a tad steep.

For around the same price, for example, you could grab an Acer Aspire One 533 with Windows 7, and dual boot with the latest Ubuntu release (including the Ubuntu One cloud features) if you really wanted some penguin-based OS action.

However, Jolicloud is hoping to tap into the anti-Microsoft brigade with its cartoon-cloaked computer.

"Who are the people who are the prisoners of the old model?" said Tariq Krim, CEO of the Paris-based company.

"The people that don’t know about computing, the people who don’t know that their computer could be easily fixed and that they can have free software instead of paying for everything".

"In the business world, Office and that make sense, but in the consumer world, Windows is unnecessary. And the elite, the early adopters, know about this, but it is not that well known for normal people".

"For me the cloud is a liberation from all the costs that make computing unnecessarily expensive".

We contacted Jobicloud to seek confirmation on the rumoured release and we were simply told to wait for official confirmation. It didn't deny the suggested date though.